Tom Newkirk is a practicing trial lawyer focusing exclusively in the areas of plaintiff-oriented civil rights and employment law. Mr. Newkirk has served as a law clerk for Judges Richard Schlegel and Rosemary Sackett of the Iowa Court of Appeals. He holds degrees from Drake University and graduated from Drake Law School in 1989. Mr. Newkirk has been working for the last several years on methods of practice that are better designed to deal with the changing realities of modern bias based on race, sex and age, otherwise known as hidden bias. He focuses on methods of raising the court's awareness to these issues and raising our own awareness. In 2003, he was the only private practicing lawyer in the country to be invited to participate in the Radcliff Exploratory Seminar on the analysis of Implicit Bias, Social Cognition and the law along with social psychologists and law professors from Yale and Harvard law schools. Since that time he continued to work to enhance understanding of the true nature of bias both with the courts and with NELA members to try and break out of the polarized view of discrimination that harms both the development of the law and the ability of our clients to seek remedies in court.